It’s OnLive! IT’S ONLIVE!!

Here it is, GDC Week and Steerpike’s not there. Why is Steerpike not there? Because his press pass didn’t come through until the very last second and flights were like $1,500, so he said screw it. Steerpike’s not made of money, people. Steerpike’s gotta count his pennies just like the rest of us. His absence has not stopped every PR Agency IN THE WORLD from emailing Steerpike constantly, inviting him to learn all about their Exciting New Technology That Will Be At GDC.

The big unveil that everyone’s talking about this morning is OnLive, a service that uses proprietary magicks and the power of cloud computing to deliver cutting edge games to less-than-cutting-edge systems – PC or HDTV. Looks like a monthly subscription plus cost of specific games is what it’ll set you back, and while my elegiac remarks about GameTap’s twilight days have probably given you some impression of how I feel about subscription services, there is one important thing to consider: yes, subscriptions suck, especially if you have to pay more on top of that for this game or that one. But if OnLive’s claims are true, you could play the cruelest, most poorly optimized, CPU-crushing games imaginable on your sorry-ass PC (or on your HDTV), but take advantage of the Cloud’s awesome CPU and GPU capabilities. Heck, if it takes off, this could be the end of home-based gaming as it’s always been known. Thoughts? Discuss!

About the author

Tap-Repeatedly Overlord Steerpike is a games industry journalist and consultant. His earliest memories are of video games, and hopes his last memories will be of them as well. He’s a featured monthly columnist with the International Game Developers Association, and is internationally published in an assortment of dull e-Learning texts and less dull gaming publications. He also lectures on games at various universities.

14 Responses to It’s OnLive! IT’S ONLIVE!!

MrPokeylope03/24/2009

I can’t imagine this working reliably over an unreliable network like the internet. But I like the idea.

ajax1903/24/2009

I agree with the concerns about this working over the internet. I mean, I play Left 4 Dead and have issues connecting to servers, lag, etc. I would hate for this to be the norm anyime I want to fire up any old game.

I think there are limitations for such a service when it comes to the hardcore gamer, who is into things like mods, super high frame rates, etc. But, for the more casual gamer, who isn’t interested in highest frame rates and resolutions, this sounds like it could work. It would eliminate the need for constant upgrades for people who aren’t into constant upgrading.

Helmut03/25/2009

This is quite impressive. A live demo of Crysis at 720p on a crappy laptop (at the 16 minute mark)

They are compressing the video frames to a very small version and they have distributed centres to help work with the lag.

I think I speak for everyone in saying I’d pony up just to watch Steerpike lay down the smiteage in World of Conflict, now, if only the internet wouldn’t go down here every time it snows.

Beta signups are in progress.

Skye03/25/2009

Whoa, Steerpike wins the award for worst headline of 2009! lol But subscription services do suck. “Hey, here play this game you spent $50 on for $20 a month.” If that sounds like a lot of MMOs, then good… Their subscriptions suck too.

Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad. I found it kind of amusing… but then, I crack myself up.

Bandwidth is an issue; the limitations of cloud computing are an issue. But perhaps the biggest issue is one Ajax brought up – what about modding, user-made content, total conversions? These are foundational now. Where’s the support for that?

If it’s $20/month and, say, $9 for every game I “buy,” it’ll pay for itself fairly quickly in the reduction of upgrades I need to pony up for. But if the OnLive people hope to roger us for $50 a game PLUS subscription, they can bite me – even if it turns out to be cheaper. I dislike greed.

Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad. I found it kind of amusing… but then, I crack myself up.

Bandwidth is an issue; the limitations of cloud computing are an issue. But perhaps the biggest issue is one Ajax brought up – what about modding, user-made content, total conversions? These are foundational now. Where’s the support for that?

If it’s $20/month and, say, $9 for every game I “buy,” it’ll pay for itself fairly quickly in the reduction of upgrades I need to pony up for. But if the OnLive people hope to roger us for $50 a game PLUS subscription, they can bite me – even if it turns out to be cheaper. I dislike greed.

Scout03/25/2009

I agree with Skye. I no likee subscription services as a rule and almost invariably…hell, always, end up canceling them. Then there is the reselling the game on eBay factor to recoup outlay which doesn’t happen with subscription…or downloads for that matter. Maybe not the most ethical stance but dark days demand grey solutions sometimes. Mods, etc. don’t bother as I’m not usually very impressed with them anyway but upgrading is getting old and I’ve had this gaming computer 3 years now. Just waiting for it to keel over and die, knock on wood.

Helmut03/26/2009

I’m really into this coolaid. The thought of being able to take $1K annual pc upgrade + game purchasing cost and spending it on game rental, ownership, and subscription is actually quite appealing, if the cost model is done right. The less I get time to play, the harder it is to justify the box that sits mostly idle.

The desktop demo from the video is really quite amazing. The idea that 10,000 feeds being generated on a server (well, a cloud) resolve to highly compressed images delivered to your desktop is, IMO, quite significant.

The benefits to the publishers are enormous. The end of piracy in its current form, fifty million new players with outdated machines now able to join in. Just as certain games are no longer developed for the pc platform, I can certainly see when games are only developed for this platform. Consoles are very much at risk as the features demoed in the video appear directly targeted to socially gaming peer groups.

I do have questions about the scalability of the cloud. We buy pretty capable and cutting edge GPU’s to play games these days. I’m not sure that’s going to scale in any way that is less than linear. If 10 people are playing Crysis on their server, isn’t that going to require 10 8800GT equivalent graphical capability units in their servers? And I guess they’ll have to buy the assets of NVidia once they go broke to do their own R&D to keep moving forward with graphics capability.

None of this works with a laggy, overpriced, or poorly scaling infrastructure. Interesting to see how this turns out.

Skye03/26/2009

This service will likely be expensive, and I am extremely against renting games (or more accurately, leasing them out with restrictive terms). Longer rental periods could have price breaks and be a “better value” than shorter ones. What if I get bored with a game? What if I don’t get around to playing it for the rest of the time that I have it? This is a good counter to piracy, but it opens a ridiculously wide margin for publishers to monopolize the market. Notice how Perlman wouldn’t use the word “marketing”? He knows he’s putting consumers over a barrel in the long run – and I’m sure he’s filthy rich already. It’s not like the R&D cash came out of his pocket. You say this wouldn’t work with an overpriced infrastructure, Helmut, yet Apple came to the forefront with overpriced gadgetry past the dot.com bust. There’s a whopping market for it – and really, the majority will speak with their pocketbooks whether the minority likes it or not. Hence the possible monopoly.

Skye03/28/2009

I didn’t mean to be derogatory, but come on, we can all see the capitalist agenda misting around this service. It honestly sounds like the introduction of Windows, and I wonder how long it would take to start bundling OnLive with all Dell PCs (like Gates did with IBM PCs) to saturate the market. They have the tech to dominate and external legitimacy via big-ticket publishers. Service is the only factor, but customers would probably still sit and pay through growing pains simply because of the convenience. OnLive grows rich by cutting the middle-man out, and we the consumers own less content than ever before. Everyone happy?

Maybe, maybe not. Sure, if OnLive technology doesn’t deliver or if the prices are too high, it’ll fail, but that’s partly a consumer decision. Bear in mind that thanks to Steam we have solid numbers indicating that runaway greed actually makes LESS money than absurdly low sale prices. Meanwhile GameTap, while not a market success, was/is a fine service for about $70 a year… meaning it’s a bargain if you finish one game during your annual subscription and a steal if you finish more than two. If OnLive is smart, and if their technology works (which I have doubts about), they might realize that the key may be to drop the subscription price or keep the cost manageable.

I certainly hope they do. But frankly the thought of using cloud computing in this way seems a little premature, given Helmut’s concerns about scalability, and the fact that even those of us with high-speed broadband are often tied to harsh download size caps, courtesy of Comcast and AT&T.

Maybe, maybe not. Sure, if OnLive technology doesn’t deliver or if the prices are too high, it’ll fail, but that’s partly a consumer decision. Bear in mind that thanks to Steam we have solid numbers indicating that runaway greed actually makes LESS money than absurdly low sale prices. Meanwhile GameTap, while not a market success, was/is a fine service for about $70 a year… meaning it’s a bargain if you finish one game during your annual subscription and a steal if you finish more than two. If OnLive is smart, and if their technology works (which I have doubts about), they might realize that the key may be to drop the subscription price or keep the cost manageable.

I certainly hope they do. But frankly the thought of using cloud computing in this way seems a little premature, given Helmut’s concerns about scalability, and the fact that even those of us with high-speed broadband are often tied to harsh download size caps, courtesy of Comcast and AT&T.

Skye03/28/2009

It’s not runaway greed I’m concerned with. It’s monopolistic control over distribution. Steam has to maintain servers but it has no costs associated with physical media. Valve didn’t suddenly start treating their customers like human beings, they just realized the old pricing structure would not work/work as well as it did with physical media, so they could easily afford to lower prices and still make very high profit. And they did so. I didn’t say the success of OnLive wouldn’t be a consumer decision, but it seems to (dangerously) create one-tier distribution. If it could offer prices roughly equivalent to Steam, the advantage to buying physical retail would be even less. OnLive also seems like the company quick to hop in bed with ISPs considering how little neutrality is in its business plan – squash GPU makers, vendors, game retailers, etc. Bring the iron fist down!